Category Archives: Tools

The Free Law Project recently announced the availability of PACER Docket Alerts on CourtListener.com. CourtListener is a free public access website tracking federal and state courts. The Docket Alert tool will send you an email anytime there is a new court filing in a case you are following in PACER. Access to PACER documents is provided by the website’s RECAP function. Clicking on the RECAP Archive link allows users to search for available PACER filings.

Setting up Docket Alerts using CourtListener is simple (quoting the Free Law Project’s press release):

“The best way to get started with Docket Alerts is to just make one. Try loading a popular case like U.S. v. Manafort or The District of Columbia v. Trump. Once the case is open, just press the “Get Alerts” button near the top. Then, just wait for your first alert.”

Give it a try. I did with U.S. v. Manafort and the Docket Alerts started flowing in the very first day the alert was set, and they just keep coming.

The primary source powering these alerts is RSS data provided by PACER websites. However, not all courts have RSS feeds yet. So another very important source is the docket information contributed by RECAP users. Attorneys and others who download documents from the PACER system using their paid accounts can participate by installing the RECAP Extension to then upload these same documents to CourtListener’s RECAP Archive. To date, 37M PACER docket entries have been uploaded to the RECAP Archive which includes 6.5M searchable PDFs. The RECAP Archive continues to grow with the addition of over 100,000 docket entries and 2000 PDFs every day.

The value of CourtListener goes well beyond RECAP and PACER. CourtListener also provides a free searchable archive of over 4M court opinions with more being added by the day. They also have one of the largest collections of oral arguments available on the Internet. Their coverage page breaks down the figures and services in greater detail.

There really is no other legal website like it. As the courts continue to charge the public fees for access to PACER, the Free Law Project practices what they call PACER Advocacy to bring these documents out into the light for the world to see for free.

Access to free PACER Docket Alerts is not unlimited, however. Any user can monitor five dockets for free. Those who install the RECAP Extension will get an additional ten docket alerts. Users who make monthly contributions to the Free Law Project can make as many alerts as they need (within a reasonable limit). The current suggested minimum monthly donation is five dollars per month.

Here in law library-land, we’re all familiar with the concept of “citation chasing”- i.e., finding one good on-point article and then mining its citations, footnotes, and citing sources for other relevant articles. But what if there were a way to let an algorithm look at the relevant article you’d already found and mine it for keywords, ultimately generating you a list of other relevant articles?

This tool allows you to place large chunks of text (or even the entire text of an article!) into its search box, which will then analyze the text and return other relevant JSTOR articles. If you’ve ever used the “related articles” link on Google Scholar (another great way to citation chase), it’s a similar algorithm. EBSCO also has a similar tool.

However, JSTOR’s Text Analyzer does several things these tools do not. Text Analyzer will also provide a list of what it has identified as relevant keywords in the article, along with importance/prominence. After you’ve run your search, though, you can play with these keywords and elevate their importance, or add or delete keywords in order to re-run your search. Therein lies the true strength of this new tool- not assuming that the search or algorithm gives perfect results right away, but allowing the user to tweak and re-tweak in order to find what they are looking for. It’s still not perfect, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction as far as search engines go, and I’m hoping this pushes other search engines to develop similar and even better tools for searching.

LLMC Digital is a searchable archive of historical primary legal sources for Wisconsin, the United States, and other jurisdictions. Wisconsin materials included in LLMC’s collections include historical Wisconsin reports, session laws, and statutes. A large number of secondary sources including federal government periodicals and treatises are also searchable via LLMC.

The Wisconsin State Law Library has recently announced that with your Wisconsin State Law Library card, you can now log into LLMC Digital from outside the library.

Established in 1949, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is the United States’ primary source for criminal justice statistics. BJS publishes many reports such as the seminal Crime in the United States as well as several data analysis tools. The Arrest Data Analysis Tool, for example, allows users to generate tables and graphs of national arrest data from 1980 onward. The results can be customized either by age and sex or by age group and race for more than 25 offenses.

Users can also view data on local arrests because the arrest data is compiled from the reporting of individual law enforcement agencies. The FBI has collected arrest counts for several decades now through its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program which forms the backbone of the underlying statistics. Over 18,000 city, university/college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily participate in the program covering about 80% of the U.S resident population. The output from this dynamic tool can be downloaded to Excel format.

Salman Khan, who founded the Khan Academy in 2006, says the partnership is meant to level the playing field to law school access for those who cannot afford the hundreds and even thousands of dollars it costs for professional test prep.

The planned test prep will work in graduated stages: testing basic knowledge to gauge a person’s strengths and weaknesses, suggesting practice options with quizzes, and full-blown practice exams. Students will receive feedback at every stage along the way. Solutions and videos will be offered to help explain items and concepts a student is having problems with.

The graphic below is from the Khan Academy’s Official SAT Practice page. It is illustrative of what the LSAT test prep landing page might look like:

The Khan Academy partnered with the College Board to become the official preparation for SAT in 2015. The goal is the same. Access to free SAT test prep levels the playing field to college access for those who cannot afford expensive professional test prep. More than 3 million students have used the SAT program so far.

The idea of providing opportunity to everyone by putting testing materials online is at the core of the Khan Academy’s mission. What’s the next frontier? Bar exam prep? Salman Khan said, in a recent interview with the online ABA Journal, “We would absolutely be open to conversations with people who administer those exams.”

Potentially the most exciting part of the Bhopal archive is that it will continue to grow. As other Bhopal scholars volunteer their unique material, it will be reviewed and added to the collection, thereby strengthening the usefulness of the collection itself.

A free alternative to The Bluebook legal citation guide is now available. The Indigo Book, formerly called “Baby Blue,” is available online without charge in PDF or HTML.

To make legal citation more accessible, the team behind The Indigo Book, led by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, separated the widely used system of citation codified in The Bluebook from its particularized expression thus avoiding infringement of that work’s copyright.

As the work’s forward explains, providing “pro se litigants, prisoners, and others seeking justice but … lack[ing] resources … effective access to the system lawyers use to cite to the law” was, for its creators, an important goal.

Have you ever been asked to complete and electronically submit a fillable PDF form only to find that you couldn’t save it after you’d finished completing it? That all you could do was print it, then have to snail mail, fax, or scan it back in?

Or maybe you’re the one who created a form then received complaints from users who spent time completing the form but couldn’t save it?

If those completing the form were using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, you’ve probably encountered this problem. While saving fillable PDFs is easy with Adobe Acrobat Pro, it’s often not possible for those using Acrobat Reader.

There are a couple of ways around this problem without spending hundreds to purchase Acrobat Pro.

For form creators, there are some simple changes that you can make to way that you save your form in Acrobat Pro that will allow users to be able to save the form that they’ve just completed. Rather than selecting Save, you’ll do a Save As and select Reader Extended PDF. For more information, see these instructions from Adobe.

I followed the instructions and successfully created a form that I could complete and save using the free Acrobat Reader. I also found that I could reopen it later and add more information. That’s especially useful for longer forms.

For form users, there is an app called Sign My Pad that allows one to fill out as well as sign any PDF form, regardless of how it was saved. It doesn’t even have to be a fillable form. You can add text, boxes, signatures, etc. to any PDF. Sign My Pad is available for less than $4 for both iPad and Android.

Stats and data about any aspect of the legal world have often been notoriously difficult to track down. I know that when I am asked a question about stats at the reference desk, I always prepare myself for what could be a difficult search.

That sigh of relief you are hearing is from law librarians and legal researchers across the US as Sunlight Foundation announced their new repository of Criminal Justice statistics called “Hall of Justice”. Not only does Hall of Justice collect many datasets into one convenient place, but it also, as HOJ’s homepage puts it, brings “criminal justice data transparency” to the forefront.

This data is out there and publicly available, but it can be nearly impossible for a casual searcher (or lawyer, or law faculty, or law librarian) to locate easily. With Hall of Justice, nearly 10,000 datasets are collected in one place and tagged with relevant keywords, allowing users to quickly locate data on a wide array of criminal justice topics ranging from sexual offenders to identify theft. While the repository is not comprehensive, it is still a great step forward in making this important information much more available.

The interface is very intuitive, and a searcher can use it to search by keyword, category or location. Once you have made your initial search, you can then filter the results by Groups (who owns/created the dataset), Sectors (governmental data or non-profit), or by Access Type. This makes the searching process simple and effective.

Try it out yourself and see what useful and eye-opening data you can find. Hall of Justice can also be found on the Law Library’s database list. If you have any questions, be sure to ask a law librarian!

Easel.ly – This is one of the easier to use visual communication tools. It offers a dozen free templates which you can easily customize. Here’s an flowchart about worker’s compensation created with Easel.ly.

Piktochart – This tool is a little more complicated to use but has some great options. Use it to create infographics, posters, presentations and reports like this one on copyright law or this one on how laws are made.